Everything Takes Longer Than You Think

“Everything takes longer than you think”.

I can’t remember exactly where I first heard this, but it’s a phase that pretty much everyday in my working life since, something has happened that reminds me of it.

And with the speed at which today’s modern world moves we can be forgive for wanting to get where we want to go in our lives at hyper speed.

Of course speed is important, particularly with content production. Turnaround times are tighter than ever, with clients and audiences alike demanding fresh high quality content faster than ever.

It’s easy to get swept away in wanting to deliver to this standard expected, even when perhaps deep down you know it’s not practical and it’s unsurprising how many of the top YouTuber’s and video creators who dedicate their lives to a rigid posting schedule can only last so long before they need to take some serious time away from creating content.

Remember everything takes longer than you think and my intuition says that keeping this in mind as you create your content (whether that’s for your personal brand or your clients) will be a huge help in the overall success of any production.

If you think a piece of client work is going to take one day, you should charge for two because it’s probably going to take three.

What’s more, if you’re only allowing yourself one day to do a piece of work that merits at least two days, not only will the quality of the piece suffer but it’s going to take a toll on you as well.

In my experience, particularly in the peak summer months for content production, it’s so easy to get caught up in a cycle where everyday you’re pushing yourself to the absolute limit to finish a piece of work, only having to wake up the next day and do exactly the same again on another project.

And for some people that’s absolutely fine but I heard a great quote this week that shifted my perspective. It went something along the lines of…

“In content creation, there’s input and output. Output is the work you put out in to the world but input is what you absorb from the world, that inspires and fuels your output”.

They say there’s one good book in everybody, and I strongly believe everyone has a certain amount of ideas they’ve absorbed from their lives that can make meaningful content. But my intuition and most importantly experience says that you need to ‘top up your tank’ when it comes to your creative content.

I know for certain my video work and even these blogs are better on the weeks that I’ve had time to read (whether that be books or blog articles) and watch work from some of my favourite content creators and have stocked up on new ideas, new techniques or just refreshed topics of thought in mind, ready to give my two cents to the world in the hope it’s of value and help to another person out there reading this.

(Again if you are reading this thank you for choosing to do so, you have no idea how grateful I am and I’ll keep trying to make these blogs more helpful for you every week).

I’ve found that accepting everything takes longer than you think can make you more content and therefore effective in your work. My intuition says you need to be aware when actually you need to keep your head down and get something done, but also the times when you need to step back and what’s more when you’re able to take to a break, do it and don’t get sucked in to work that can wait for another day…

“A fool sleeps when he has to. A wise man sleeps when he can.”

This summer my business partner and I took on a studio space and it’s been almost four months now since we moved in and we’ve barely scratched the surface of what we wanted to do in it by this time.

And that’s not always necessarily a bad thing, by taking more time than we anticipated to get things set up and going in the studio our original plans have changed, we’ve got new ideas and are hopefully on the path to making it a more effective and useful space that we had previously envisioned.

Remember, everything takes longer than you think.

Use it to your advantage.

And I wish you every success.
 
Jack

About Jack

I help people, brands and business communicate more effectively with their customers through visual, audio and written content.

I do this through Southpaw Sport, the sports content marketing company I’m currently building as well as on a freelance basis working for agencies and production companies.

Visit www.jacktompkins.co

You can follow me on YouTube where I post videos and vlogs sharing my experience and opinion on content production.

YouTube — https://www.youtube.com/user/jackt18

And my social media for behind the scenes look at what I’m up to

Instagram — @jackwrtompkins

Twitter — @jackwrtompkins